welcome back to our final big picture arrival of the year our panel tonight neil mccabe senior reporter human events online editor of the guns and patriots column marc harrold libertarian commentator attorney and author of the book observations of white noise acid test for the first amendment and sam sex progressive commentator and contributor to truthout dot org let's talk about a labor union rates are dropping and as they have ever since the well arguably since since the early fifty's have to pass just have tarte when forty seven but

they really started dropping fast after the after rip through the reagan presidency . so has the middle class assure of income you know wealth goes down and as you know the wealth of individuals in fact we have a chart so we've unionization rates here we go you notice the the red line is union membership rate the blue line is aggregate income of the middle class those two follow each other and then the green line is the income of the top one percent about the percentage of sitcoms on radio i think that also felt the same rates this is starting in sixty seven by that time all those accounts were going to radio jean shepherd was you know he was tottering by that point but this is this is a really important thing is it not i mean that when workers have a say in the workplace when there's democracy in the workplace you have a middle class when you don't have democracy in the workplace you have the world the charles the charles dickens wrote about and you know we've please. graduate

aerobat mr graduate i have a lump of coal that i ever had out of the last of pads but if manufacturing lends itself more to unionization than some of those you know the sort of the money making money industries and you can to unionize real estate agents why not because they work on commission they work on where you are unionized bank employees but a stipulating that that moving from a manufacturing economy to a fire economy is a good thing i think that that's another argument that we already have that's fine but there still is a lot of manufacture in the united states and it's still love in percent and if you have stronger unions in manufacturing you wouldn't see this sort of you know you wouldn't see this sort of outsourcing of actual factories you would have workers at the table having a say in the future of their company but you know everywhere not talking about the picture we did anybody going to unions are free to make their case aren't they you know they're not sure they are either not it's a two billion dollar union busting is a two billion dollar industry employers will lock employee unions made a lot of money too and require them to sit there for hours and hours sometimes days

and days listening anti-union propaganda telling them that they're going to be fired and there's virtually no recourse hasn't been since the reagan administration i mean here's this is another amazing statistic marc i'd like to get your take on this you know historically corporate profits and wages have been similar portions of g.d.p. right now wages make up three percent of g.d.p. corporate profits make up fifteen percent of g.d.p. so there's nothing more important than association right you know ok i'm sorry no this is unions are great i like unions i think very important i think that there is a collateral relationship between huge the middle class all i've ever said about unions is the government should be refereeing there should be no laws that either from their own those unions that literally or you don't have it both ways so you can't have it both ways because you need the collective bargaining of the unions the people these people need workers the larger the company that you're talking about with the one percent in the in the c.e.o. he needs workers and those workers have value and they can somewhat stopping a c.e.o. from just firing all the workers once they sign to you. contract nothing. nothing

at all but the when they just do that every time they wouldn't do that every day you could make the case absolutely you know the origins of the owners saying listen we hear value we can train our guys we can take care of the health benefits there are things that the union can do to make this a better run physically in industries that you could just fire everybody because they're not skilled jobs and there are those people literally i mean we have these letters for a reason because before these laws existed when workers were trying to you know as it be mowed down you know they were just it was an extremely violent phase for working people making really you know you know really technological you know highly technological even our prayer factories highly technological now you're not going to see that same thing not to be able to fire everybody and get rid of the of institutional knowledge of corporate knowledge and there are legal who robs who are willing to depend very little for a drawbar and they can't show up and tell no they can't exactly i mean you're talking about certain kinds of jobs of those jobs are of low skill where they can be easily replaced if you do a job that's easily replaced you are going to find yourself with the down into the spectrum because if you can be easily replaced economically the value is in place

action them should you have some know history should be condemned if you are going to i don't want to hang people you can just say only let me just put this in historical context is what you guys are arguing is that if the labor market is tight enough if there's enough competition among and between employers for employees then the employees can start dictating terms yes ok i understand that to the best of my knowledge and correct me if i'm wrong this is only happened once in the history of western civilization and. from from from around the year eight hundred until today with the single exception is one period in time we've had situations where employers were able to basically mow down employees if they tried to unionize and that one time was in the thirteen forties as i recall after the black plague wiped out a thirty year up and that and that what that did was it caused the price of labor to double and then the next year double again and then the next year double again to the point where laborers started forming guild. it's the oldest one of the

masons the stone masons and as a consequence of that suddenly for the first time in the history of western civilization a middle class emerge and it was called the renaissance and it lasted about three generations and by that time enough people had had reproduced and repopulated that the workers employers were able to start you know busting up their unions again but that's it i mean it's impractical and immoral to bring back the play so well stimulate that having said that same. thing you do with pain finance reform movements of morality these are the good that are blowing up but we don't really know but we do know that nurses are very highly valued nurses are going to you know or did one of my kids in those nurses are being imported from the philippines like there's no two hundred raveling nurses who will visit like say cape cod their nurses will just work on cape cod for four months during the summer and they're done for the year because the because the population swells that's when the

hospitals need them and that's when they pay so there are times in this world in this park where where there is a demand for things for people and it can happen again to people and nurses or unionizing not all of them all across the united states let's let's all have this not all of them there what there was a time when they imply that the real world you have you have a corporation like wal-mart in which the people who own wal-mart own six people the walton family own more wealth than forty percent of the nation combined and you have greeters making seven bucks an hour seven twenty five an hour here would it be so bad if these people were unionized to make a living wage make fifteen dollars an hour especially a profitable what money does have you got a straw fick well it depends where i mean you've got to make you've got to pay workers so that they can survive so they begin to pay the bills with health care for their family to be productive members of the economy why are all the people why do these five people have so much wealth why are these stores everywhere especially if their lyrics policies were changed in the eighty's the education of that age are still going to be. i don't know why it's because the prices are low the price of

oil you have ever agreed to make a fifteen dollars the prices are going to be that low americans want low prices so if you can have any more money and nobody's owed a job all these people we're talking about they can just fire i mean what we're really saying is why can these people be able to fire their employees they can fire their employees because their employees don't know the job i.e. you only kind but if you didn't fire people because i gave working for you that's why i didn't see you want to do your it is drive you are what you're describing is labor conditions outside of the renaissance period and i agree with f.d.r. that i think people do have a right to a job if they want to job they should be able to have a job in america where the wealthiest nation on earth and somebody has to provide a forum and then be the terms have to be imposed upon the employer and they have to provide a job because this person has a right to a job and even if the market doesn't bear you have to pay what it takes to live not what their values worth your company i believe the market would bear it if the wealth wasn't so concentrated in the hands of you know point zero one percent of the population because the market would work it out say oh i agree with. them nor

do i was a little way to argue it is the way to the border it would self correct me if i don't know if they can't fire their own workers is more in the year one percent or two percent of the population controlling the euro whatever that percentage is that number may stay the same structurally but it's different people through generations so if you look at the wealthiest people in america though i years ago ten years ago there's a lot of more movement in the united states. now where you're actually less economically mobile than we have been since the late nineteenth century well i would i would agree that we're probably there's less mobility and without a lot of ability for o.e.c.d. countries where the second to the last economically mobile whereas when reagan came into office we were number one now we're number thirty three out of thirty four and here's a part of the reason why is this difference between productivity and this is the chart that those pop that chart up the green line is real median income. family

income and historically and you could again this starts in forty seven but you can literally take this back to seven hundred ninety three in fact i did one of my in my book rebuild the american dream from seven hundred ninety three until until the reagan administration as workers became more productive their wages went up they the two track each other continuously i mean there were bombs here and there but they tracked each other and then it changed because reagan changed the rules of the game change taxation policy change and i just find sleep through the eighty's i was a worker and so easy i don't have to know what exactly it takes awhile it takes well i so look at what happened here this gap opens up and in that gap is a whole pile of money and where does all that money go that's in that gap that used to be going to the workers it's going to the top one percent in fact it's going to top one tenth of one percent well that's probably a lot of that your bailout that we had to borrow nothing to do with bailouts in one nine hundred sixty six time magazine had a cover story called talking about the leisure society that was coming where they said that by the year two thousand if productivity continued to increase and wages

continue to track productivity by the year two thousand the average american worker would be working thirty hours a week and a single worker would be able to support a family and if the top one percent was not making two hundred seventy five percent what they were making when reagan came into office instead if they were making if they were seeing their wealth grow at the same rate as everybody else then we would i mean france went to a thirty five hour week the germans when during the recession they went to they went to a thirty hour week that's going to ten hour week and then everybody out of a job well if we went to a twenty we go to a twenty five hour wait we're work week right now if we tied productivity to wages and all the commission. in some industry we know where the money went when the lions were together before the ninety's c.e.o.'s made about forty times more than their workers made now that a lot of separated the four hundred times thousand times more than their workers getting paid they are stealing money from their workers the extra productivity and it's ironic that conservatives say we want workers to keep the fruits of their labors we don't want government to. tax all their fruits of their labors but

they're perfectly fine with c.e.o.'s just stealing stealing how much money employer employee should be made to make their increased bird if it's a mistake to pay you know michael eisner or whoever all that money then their company will fail i mean the problem is i look at how if it starts to fail sometime what if it does but if it does there it has it the problem is that you have now when you have what you just amazing and. there's often a system has been has been rigged you know it's a little before and said you know the system is really market thirty sec it's not the rigs it's just the system this idea we continue to vilify this one percent that it's not just i don't believe that they're stealing the money this is their corporate model they pay what they pay but the bottom line here is this one percent it also comes back to dividends and many of the people who work for this company the profits come back to them and david soucie it's not it's not just about this one percent this ninety nine percent that's too simplistic and i do believe i but i the fact that we vilify this one percent i think we've gone overboard where everything's the fault of the rich and the rich of these companies for reasons they

provide a value that the board of directors decided a word that they never did and your corner stores they're working on it are telling me that a plate is coming more and more of that i'd say i'm a big picture rumble of the year right after the break. the worst year for going through the. white house with a. radio guy for a minute. what. did you never seen anything like this i'm sorry. let me let me i want to know we're going to let me ask you a question. here on this network is what we're having a debate we have our night. with you this time it's about staying there again hearing this story will be and i don't

mean to talk about the name and. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

the big picture rumble on our panel that i had neil mccabe marc harrold and sam sachs and let's get back to it i want to talk about social programs but i'd actually like to start with something that i consider to be infrastructure we talk about infrastructure we think of roads and bridges but i think that the most important infrastructure that this country has is our intellectual infrastructure and that's where young people thomas jefferson started the university of virginia as a free college because he thought he believed that anybody that if you wanted to build a nation had to have a life you had to have an educated electorate. abraham lincoln he gave hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of acres of land certainly hundreds of millions of dollars worth of land to individual states to create land grant colleges the one

that i went to briefly was michigan state university where they they had it and they still have all these giant farms and they so that they could actually make enough money to keep the college going so that they could give people free educations university california was free until ronald reagan came along as governor. at why not join the rest of the civilized world and we're the only country in the world that has student loan debt that at anything close to the kind of proportions we have the only developed country why not mark why not why not say if you can go to college it's free or if you can go to trade school become a good mechanic it's free so you talk about just paying for actually controlling it i'm talking about in i'm talking about paying for it and calling it an investment instead of building a bridge or in addition to building a bridge we're building a mind we're building skilled workers whether it's a bricklayer or whether it's an engineer because well part of the government's involvement in student loan that's where we are with that the reason the most students are majoring in debt is because we have an industry you have something in colleges that so far outpaces the market you have

a product that goes up and up and up and people couldn't afford it the only reason they can afford it is because lockstep the government increases the amount of the grants the government increases the amount of the loans we have way too much government interference in education you're saying that edges that the price of education is going up because people are able to borrow more of the subsidy yes and yes absolutely absolutely i mean you have something there's no way people could go to college that the tuition is totally outpaced the market they would have to fly to that i would have been for two hundred years we could federal government got in there and got lockstep with them and they just increase or decrease how much each student can get when ronald reagan came into office roughly eighty percent was seventy nine and change roughly eighty percent of the cost of college education was paid for by federal state or local governments. gruffly twenty percent was paid for by students today roughly eighty one percent of tuition is paid for by students and less than seventeen percent is paid by federal state but those limits are naples we had flown in upside down it went with their unable to go but it's been flipped

upside down for most of their history their own private loans zero out the grants and then the price falls it has to it has to do we can afford it nobody could afford to go to college without the government up in the loan so if you have a product that completely outpaced its consumer ok so we were either you're actually making sense if we were to say. there are going to be no more college loans period we're going to outlaw college loans a couple conservatives here who want to totally manipulate their listening to god it subsidy and we're going to out there outlaws student loans we're not going to subsidize them in any way you know that's it only only rich people who have really good credit ratings can go to college probably the price of college would go down but is that the best thing for the united states of america well this also think called the united states army tom and so people serve their country in uniform so the corrugated fodder. i don't think cannon fodder is how we describe service to our nation well those who are saying we're going to direct people who can afford to go in may be a productive member of congress were to put them on the front lines and in point

for the nation i don't think there's any shame in serving in there i don't think there should be there but should we but i mean if someone wants to get a college education if somebody willing to serve their country in return the government says we're going to help you go to college would support a new g.i. bill or something like some something like that i think the g.i. bill we have now is fantastic well mark i'm you know i lived in germany for a year and worked with a nonprofit in fact i still work with the most international nonprofit salem international and at the time that i live there i don't know what their policy is now but at the time that i live there when you got to high school you gave one year of service to your country could either be in the military or you could volunteer with a nonprofit we had a bunch of these kids coming through the program that i was with and after that year you got free college i don't object to that there's a there's a high. why do that there's a catholic high school in boston where the high school students work as in turns in the summer and they work one day a month for companies in boston the companies take what would be their salary and they give it to the school in lieu of tuition you can't have a you can't have

a household income over forty five thousand to get into this school and the whole idea is unlike other private schools the idea is we never want your kids to go to this school and it's a fantastic program in other words the no no's legacy subsidies no like a family the way that it is in fact a job i want to yell son tom o'neil for the record we are treating members of military like voter if you look at the suicide rates if you look at the homelessness rates if you look at the the inadequate treatment of p.t.s.d. and everything like that. we i mean it's terrible stop that's what i mean that's really just to say it was never going to get a second as soon as i did the right address this question of margaret i can i do get me i'd like to your take on it because again we're going to we're talking about a huge violation of libertarian free market principles you're the libertarian here who i'm going to just i'm against your free education program and i decided you know if wanted a year to year to your government your government gives you back an education

what's wrong with that well first of all everyone's going to go and therefore everyone's pre-condition when you get out of high school to be a government employee for a year it's a problem there if you want to work for a year or two years in your country no no i don't have a problem serving the first of all i do agree with some of what sam said there too there's clearly if if individuals who are rich can go straight to school and individuals who are poor have to go put themselves in danger for the country first there's going to be a disparate effect to that and in a general way i don't know about the call them cannon fodder i say we're both you're coming from but no i completely i'm against this for one thing any time that the government pays for something over time any time it pays for something over time it comes slowly creeping to define it so theoretically if the government pays for all education over time the government will come to the final education things will be favor you will be able to go to certain schools because they're private parochial schools and we don't agree with their stance on this or with that there will be conditions put on it there's no first of all everything free is worth what you pay for it is an education something that's different i mean we're not talking about the government controlling macy's or the government controlling pizza hut or

anything like that we're talking about education which all of us don't want to go to the government if you don't have a smartphone and we're going to graduate from a four year degree one hundred thousand dollars in debt in your degree is in renaissance poetry we didn't let go and that's ten years and years of my life i mean we did call your decision but i don't know if the guy paid you know pumping gas should be paying taxes to support that sort of fund degree while people don't want to go to college everybody's paying and then also i don't want to go to college girls and here too i mean in germany they're very big on trade schools and . it's a four year and we had a player i grew up in my town we had a four year vocational high school that people went to and of course the problem with a lot of these vocational high schools is that the trade unions won't accept the certificates from the schools and you end up you end up having to go through the answer might surprise anyone is going to have the final say on this because there's a trillion dollars in student loan debt and syrians are not going to put up with any more there's going to be massive organized defaults and pretty soon the government going to have to act so that when it's your job to call to that should

be taxable income and so those people those people should be held accountable well it's going to be a form of protest when they start to fall i think know whether it will do me have money major social upheaval free college added to health care really becomes after a while cradle to grave is just government government government and it's a problem when you just know you are there every step of the way the government's going to define how you live you go to college will pay for you rather every step of the way that you are indentured to a corporation or what you want to do is or do a corporation or a boss then this would also i think inhibit the entrepreneurial spirit the people that want to open businesses you know want to go to school there are one main problem is that any time the government funds something over time they come to define it education will be defined by the government if they pay for it long enough coverage certainly a decent salary by and by the government since the onset of the nation pretty much yeah ok i guess we have i think we've all had our say on this what if we were to lower those let's shift to so security medicare i have suggested for some time now and i actually have a couple of economists who agreed with us that if we dropped the social security

retirement age the medicare eligibility age from sixty five to fifty five it would suck for five million people out of the out of the work place you know this would voluntarily retire which would tighten up the labor market which would drive up wages you'd have your employers competing all of a sudden drive up wages which would drive up tax collections which would pay for the people who retired. why not do it. why would you want to expand the amount of people who receive useful security at a very time when we have few workers actually supporting so sick is that because the workers and people are living longer because suddenly have more workers supporting social security and by the way are people who are living longer or economically the top twenty percent from bottom eighty percent are not living longer and you know. that but and in fact you can even parse that out tighter but but no what i'm saying is if we did this it's not that you're going to have more people taking the same pie it's you're going to have a much larger pipe because you're younger workers right now you've got

a hole you've got millions of people who were paying unemployment benefits to you instead would be working and paying taxes to us to your tutor we the people of the government cut back to your unemployment payments obviously but also throw people out of their throw me on the stroll if you don't used to be if you don't have a job you could start a business and i've been told for four years that the obama administration is supporting small business so should be very easy to start with it's easy to start small businesses and those were certain absolutely i was like i was to reagan no sherman antitrust or well yes it would start small business because there's too much government regulation i mean we are going to see the world view here and that is capitalism is a high stakes game and if you can't compete you're going to die we're not going to give you health care. you're going to die i mean and people are dying and that's the truth people forty thousand people die every year because they don't have health insurance that's insane we need to be having your let's have capitalism let's tell you let's have billionaires let hundreds of millions like nine hundred millionaire not one hundred million but let's also care for the people who are

losers you tell it as soon as nobody got in the market let's let's assume he's being sincere. my suggestion is solid it's what you hear mildly but in the american dream but would they would they take a smaller payout would it be you know if you if you could do the math on this if if if it if it succeeded if half the people between fifty five and sixty five. opted for early retirement after that if half of those people did it would reduce it would tighten the labor market to the point that wages would go up and social security therefore payroll deductions would go up taxes would go up it would fund the program have the same effect as a put yeah there is actually there you go to all those there you go if we can figure that out i'd be perfect without it i thought you lived happy about is going to make social security the plague but it's not quite nice guy i mean i'm willing to tamper with those things if the at the payout is so all you're willing to acknowledge the sole security actually is a useful thing i'm willing to say that i don't have the power to get rid of it and

if i could get rid of it i can't argue the social security is going to where i think that there should be options for privatization for individual investors but i either way i agree that if you have social security and i'm going to say it's a necessary evil in the context of what i'm saying it's a necessary evil if there really are in other words you can't you can't have a program that's going to exist you either get rid of it you privatized but it's you know exist and these things are pragmatically impossible if there really are some steps you can take where the numbers make more sense obviously i want social security to be as efficient as a kid assuming it has to exist in the first place we've got to wrap it up. marc harrold sam sachs thank you all for being sure to be with you much happy new year and that's the way it is tonight our last show of two thousand and twelve no forget democracy begins with you get out there get active tag your it and happy here.

the law. comes upon my. clock.

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